Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, November 12, 1994 TAG: 9411140075
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A4/INTL EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: KUWAIT CITY, KUWAIT LENGTH: Medium
Instead of fresh water, they brim with tons of crude oil and sludge. Foul odors rise from their surfaces, and, for birds and small animals, they are gooey deathtraps. A rusting Iraqi tank sits on the edge of one of the ponds, sunk up to its axles.
The ponds, which formed as hundreds of sabotaged oil wells burned and gushed wildly, are vivid examples of the environmental damage of the Persian Gulf War.
Experts here and in Washington say that the estimated billion barrels of oil that spilled over the desert and into the Persian Gulf, the oil well fires that darkened the skies for eight months, the thrashing the desert took from tanks, and the hodgepodge of unexploded bombs and mines that were left behind added up to an enormous ecological disaster.
Yet, nearly four years later, no one has a clear sense of whether the country was dealt a crippling blow or whether the damage is being absorbed.
Environmentalists suspect, however, that the character of the desert has been gravely changed.
``You must think of the desert like the tundra of the north,'' said Dr. Mahmood Yousef Abdulraheem, the secretary general of Kuwait's Environmental Protection Council.
``The topsoil is very fragile - like an eggshell. If that gets disturbed, plants are not likely to regain growth in that region - ever.''
No comprehensive studies are under way to track the damage, but medical centers report a slight increase in respiratory ailments. Commercial fishermen say they are taking fewer fish from the gulf, and fewer birds are reported in the region than before the war. And every month, a few people are maimed by left-behind mines and bombs.
Though the oil on the beaches was so thick after the war that it looked like an asphalt highway along the water's edge, the Kuwaitis did little cleanup.
Winds and tides took a lot of the oil south to Saudi Arabia. Some worked its way to the ocean bottom off Kuwait, environmentalists say, undoubtedly suffocating coral reefs and seabeds and poisoning fish.
One afternoon on the beach near the border with Saudi Arabia, Abdul Rahman Awadi, a former health minister who is chairman of the government's Environmental Assessment Committee, picked up several objects that looked like rocks and cracked them open with his hands.
Inside, they were moist, black and sticky. One of Awadi's sons lifted several spades full of sand and, about 18 inches down, veiny streaks of oil appeared.
``All the beaches are like this,'' he said. ``It will take five or 10 years for this to go away.''
The government-owned Kuwait Oil Company vacuumed 20 million gallons of oil from the lakes, said Abdul Jabbar Abdul Salam, the company's representative on the national Oil Lake Removal Committee.
But about 2 million barrels are still in the desert ponds or slowly seeping toward Kuwait's underground water supply. So far, environmentalists say, the underground water has not been contaminated.
by CNB